Accelerating AI adoption: How insurers can stay ahead

Learn how to align customer expectations and business performance while implementing AI securely, ethically and at speed.
Date posted
21 May 2024
Reading time
5 minutes
Gary Hunter
Business Development Director, Commercial ·

Balancing customer expectations with regulatory requirements

For insurance organisations, customer experience matters more than ever. Customers have come to expect personalised touchpoints, omnichannel experiences and seamless end-to-end journeys, shaped by their interactions with digital native suppliers. Too often, their experiences fall short of those expectations, which has been highlighted by the FCA. This is particularly important for neurodivergent customers who may need suitable adjustments made so they can access their insurers' products and services fully. The FCA’s Consumer Duty has set higher and clearer standards for firms regarding customer needs: 

 

"Firms must deliver good outcomes to customers while continually monitoring outcomes and evaluating them to ensure compliance. It is the responsibility of firms to define what good outcomes mean to their organisation and measure their progress with data."

While most insurers have implemented various FCA recommendations regarding Consumer Duty compliance, it is important to remember that customer experience initiatives take months or years to realise their full potential, so the time to invest is now.  Insurers often discover that investing in customer experience drives operations efficiency and that these 'stacked wins' combine to improve the bottom line.

Artificial intelligence can help monitor customer journeys and outcomes by:

  • Assessing large data sets and developing regulatory responses for internal and FCA reviews. 
  • Being proactive rather than reacting to regulations and market circumstances as and when they occur. This can drive new developments and create reflexive regulatory packages in insurance to aid compliance and customer facing teams in challenges in near real time. 
  • Showing how products are being managed and flag any regulatory issues 
  • Allowing for more wide-ranging reviews of policies, products and procedures as LLM models can be tested against policy documentation, regulatory guidance, and internal procedures to search for potential improvements.  
  • Assess the likelihood of a customer switching to another Insurance provider by analysing price rises in policies or services and supply mitigating information or a better assessment of the customer's needs. 
  • Identifying vulnerable customers within an insurer’s database and flagging this to ensure that their personal needs are met, whether this is through accessible documentation and technologies or interactive tools. 

What are the other key use cases for AI in insurance?

AI can be adopted across any part of your insurance organisations, however the following core use cases can provide a higher level of impact on business performance: 

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Claims processing
Claims handlers can use AI to support written and verbal communications to customers, tailoring this to the customer’s preferred style.
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AI readiness
Defining the role AI plays in enabling the organisation’s wider business strategy, increasing the pace of AI adoption in a responsible and ethical way
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Fraud protection
Detect patterns that might indicate fraudulent behaviour
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Document processing
Improve productivity by using AI to read, analyse, inform and act on information
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Preserving specialist knowledge
Surfacing and retaining tacit and explicit knowledge within the organisation, improving the time to productivity of new joiners

Accelerating AI adoption and keeping up with innovation

To convert AI aspirations into outcomes, Insurers must address these four major challenges: 

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Business alignment
AI initiatives are typically created in a silo and are solely technology focused. Any initiative must be engaged with the wider business strategy
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Using AI responsibly
A clearly defined AI framework considering the challenges and complexities of delivering responsible AI solutions is key to maximising the projected business value
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Data
Without properly prepared and curated data, it is not possible to trust the output AI solutions
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Tools and talent
AI engineering, data science, and AI developer skills are all in short supply and AI literacy in organisations is nascent

If you would like to understand more about accelerating AI adoption in your organisation and maximise its impact on your process, check out our Generative AI in FSI whitepaper: 

About the author

Gary Hunter
Business Development Director, Commercial ·
For more than 25 years Gary has worked delivering technology based solutions to business problems. He is a Chartered Management Institute certified Professional Consultant and Business Analyst who was reborn in the cloud 6 years ago and has subsequently worked on more than 35 cloud big data and ML transformation projects.